Abstract

Natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, tsunamis, blizzards, floods, droughts, etc. can cause loss of life and damage to property and as well to nature that includes agriculture and water resources. The quantum of such loss or damage depends on several factors. In the case of weather disasters, humans play vital destructive role. For the past one decade world over witnessed extreme weather events such as urban floods in India, hurricanes in southern USA, bomb cyclones in northeastern USA-Canada. All these received wide media coverage; and rulers of the nations and so-called scientific community started attributing suchevents to climate change, which is used as de-fact global warming. The historical pattern on the occurrence of such extreme weather events dispels this type of notion. Many a time they try to look at short period information and come up with sensational conclusions, which have serious repercussions’ on long-term planning for agriculture, water resources, etc. There is well-established data about these matters. However, there is a limitation on such historically data in both space and time as the recording started around 1850s;
and prior to that written descriptions and as folklores of the events and consequent disasters are only available. Surprisingly extreme
weather events are not only confined to warmer weather conditions but also to colder weather conditions. It is a fact that magnitude
of temperature is not a driving force but temperature gradient plays vital role on extreme weather events formation. Both in summer
and winter India gets cyclones; and the same is the case in USA. Also, we should not look at extreme weather events as destructive
events but they provide succor by increasing on land and in ground water and thus their impact on agriculture.